Over the years, web applications and network components supporting such applications have become more complex. For example, a typical modern enterprise web application includes not only browsers and web servers, but also other components, such as a common gateway interface scripts, application servers, databases, etc. A network infrastructure to support such applications typically includes load balancers, firewalls, enterprise-wide directory access protocol (LDAP) servers, single sign on-agents, etc.
Although many of these devices/components can improve the scalability of web services and network security, they also have the potential to increase inefficiencies that are associated with the services. For example, including an application server in the architecture of a web application can increase the overall latency in response time of the application.